About BBH Labs

Labs is BBH’s global R&D unit. We’re tasked with pioneering new outputs and approaches: exploring emerging platforms and behaviours on behalf of brands, and developing new agency models along the way. Our overall ambition is to save the world find ways in which marketing innovation can be a powerful force for good (more effective, more engaging, more sustainable, more exciting). We’re particularly interested in:

– Innovative new forms of creativity
– Novel approaches that are rapid, iterative & curatorial
– The mashup of thinking from radically different sources & industries
– Sustainable marketing at scale
– Co-creation and mass collaboration
– Social ideas and how they propagate
– Marketing as product or service

Who we are

BBH Labs (@bbhlabs) was co-founded by Mel Exon and Ben Malbon in 2008. Mel continues to be part of the Labs team, based in London, and is now BBH London’s Managing Director. If you’re looking for Ben, you’ll now find him at Google as their Director of Creative Partnerships in New York, or on twitter @malbonnington.

Agathe Guerrier (@agatheg, @weganwednesdays)Head of BBH Labs, Strategy Director, London
I studied ethnography, Japanese, and other obscure subjects in Paris and California, then started my career as a qualitative researcher in Japan, before joining the world of advertising with BETC Paris about a decade ago. Besides brands, I’m interested in people, yoga, forests, traveling, and vegan food. Oh and technology of course.

Jeremy Ettinghausen (@jeremyet)Innovation Director, London
I studied anthropology, psychology and genetics with a smattering of statistics and have since attempted not to get bogged down doing any one particular thing. Failed at this by spending thirteen years at Penguin Books where I worked on a number of digital publishing and marketing initiatives including We Tell Stories, a collaboration between writers and game designers and, most recently, myFry, a non-linear reading application for Mr Stephen Fry. I am easily distracted and distract others and I firmly believe that the internet’s prime function is to be a massive distraction engine for all mankind. Other distractions include a wife and two evolving digital natives, mapping and psychogeography and photographing unplaces.

Mel Exon (@melex/gplus.to/melex)
Managing Director, London
I graduated with a degree in Russian and German in the early nineties, leading – unsurprisingly, maybe – to a career coloured by advertising for spirits and beer brands. I subsequently ran Levi’s Europe and British Airways as a Partner at BBH, before starting BBH Labs. I live in London with my family and like snow, horses, The Atlantic, electronica, Leica cameras and chips, in roughly that order. I like the very old and the very new. This informs an ongoing war in my head: a deep-rooted desire for shiny new things versus the sure and certain knowledge that I should re-use and recycle the old stuff. I spend too much time on the interwebs, but rationalise it all as preparation for when theTechnological Singularity kicks in. See you on the other side, my friends.

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We aren’t hiring at the moment but are always interested in meeting with people or organizations working in similar areas. If you’d like to discuss collaborating with Labs, please contact us at: collaborators@bbh-labs.com. Let’s chat.